Monthly Archives: August 2010

I haven’t had my B2B Twitter account for terribly long, but I’ve had it long enough to know what I like and don’t like about it.

Likes:

Making connections with people in my profession and market.

Getting a real-time view of the sentiment and perceived needs of my market

Learning about software, leadership, marketing, and technology. And other random stuff too.

Finding new business partners, blog partners, customers, friends.

Making money. Twitter results in revenue that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

Helping people when I can.

Following and being followed by people who are interesting, communicative, and who personally engage. My tweeps…I love ‘em!

Putting a face on my company’s services a bit. When your specialty is QuickBooks data, that could maybe seem a little dry.

Dislikes:

Anything automated about Twitter follows. I experimented with autofollowing for awhile, but don’t do it anymore. It seemed fake and unable to actually help with any of my social media goals. Automated following and unfollowing leaves me cold.

Generic DMs. I respond to a real DM. I ignore automated, generic ones. One step away from spam, in my book.

Here are the quickest ways — the shortcuts — to running into trouble with QuickBooks:

Get a business owner — not a professional bookkeeper or accountant — to set up the books. This is like a business owner who is not in the construction business pouring their own concrete and putting in their office plumbing themselves. You can maybe do it, but you probably won’t do it that well, and it’s hard to undo/redo it later.

Postpone reconciling…for months. Sometimes it’s a headache to reconcile your bank accounts and credit card accounts. And who likes a headache? If you put off reconciling for another day, then your reports won’t be accurate and you create an even bigger headache later on.

Don’t backup your data; assume that your computer hardware and software will always be healthy. Assume that because QuickBooks is working great today, it will be fine tomorrow as well. Take a gamble…what’s the worst that could happen? You can always fork out a few hundred to get your data repaired.

Entrust everything to one person. Bookkeeping fraud and embezzlement is what happens to the other guy, right? Have only one set of eyes on the books, the one person who receives and pays the bills, supervises payroll, writes checks, reconciles the books, and prepares the financials. That’s a shortcut to white collar crime in your office.

Intuit has a free, downloadable tool to help diagnose and troubleshoot connectivity and multi-user issues. The QuickBooks Connection Diagnostic Tool can help solve certain 6000 errors and H202 and H505 errors.

Their tool is compatible with QuickBooks 2008, 2009, and 2010 versions (for Enterprise Edition users, versions 8, 9, and 10.) It works under Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

My family was in Yellowstone National Park last week, and we needed to find a wifi hotspot so that my daughter could log in and add some college classes to her fall class schedule.

We saw this and went to the Visitor Center with our laptop:

yellowstone wifi?

Only one problem. That little graphic sign doesn’t mean wifi.

It means amphitheatre.

Low tech. A place for non-digitized presentations on plants, animals, rocks, the Shoshone tribe, and Wyoming natural history.

I felt a little silly.

But then again, maybe it would be silly to have wifi in the middle of a historic national park like Yellowstone. Come on, Yellowstone is about nature! A place to which we flee our technology culture.

So it’s cool with me that there was an amphitheatre instead of a hotspot. But maybe they should change their sign.

[Actually, Yellowstone sits on top of a huge geothermal phenomenon called a hotspot, which powers Old Faithful, the Black Dragon’s Lair and all the other thermal wonders of the park. But of course that kind of hotspot is about hot lava under the ground rather than internet access above it.]